FOOTBALL: What is the point of Ross Barkley?

If ever English football could write a tale to chronicle its own gross insecurities and identity crisis, it would read a lot like the career of Ross Barkley. Raised in a Liverpool neighbourhood with a track record of bearing prodigal fruit (John Lennon and George Harrison, to name just two) and signed to pro-youth papers with Everton as an 11-year-old, Barkley was perhaps destined to burden the hopes of a nation. And perhaps destined to disappoint them, too.

How could anyone satisfy the expectations placed upon every English player of such promise? Wayne Rooney this year became the country’s greatest ever goalscorer - bypassing a record which had stood for 45 years - and still his achievements are considered below the measure that was once held against him. Barkley stands no chance.

But the Everton midfielder might be a victim of the environment he - and every other English footballing prodigy - currently finds for himself. Barkley is the embodiment of English football’s confused self-image and expectations of itself. He doesn’t know what to be because the sport doesn’t know what it wants him to be. What exactly is the point of Ross Barkley?

Well, by Roberto Martinez’s, Roy Hodgson’s and pretty much everyone else’s reckoning, he is the glittering vanguard of English football’s next generation. If the past decade can be defined as the Age of Rooney, and the Age of Gascoigne before that, the next 10 years are predicted to be Barkley’s time.

And yet still nobody seems sure of what kind of player Barkley truly is. The Everton midfielder is described as a mix of Paul Gascoigne, Xabi Alonso, Michael Ballack, Steven Gerrard and Wayne Rooney, but he doesn’t possess the singular ability - or identity - of any of those players. He is something entirely different, whilst somehow something entirely the same.

In many ways Barkley is the archetypal English football player - mobile, athletically capable and yet tactically naive and often questionable on the ball. He sometimes gives the impression of skill, beating one, two or even three players with a mazy dribble, but there’s always the sense that a faceplant is never more than one touch of the ball away. At times the ball runs away with him, rather than him running with the ball. No other Premier League player makes dribbling look as difficult - as laborious - as Barkley.

That’s not to say that Barkley isn’t effective - because he is. He is currently enjoying his best ever campaign as a professional, scoring three goals and notching three assists in 12 Premier League appearances. At just 21 years old those numbers are relatively impressive and bolster his case as the brightest young talent English football has to offer - but does anyone have any idea how to harness that potential?

As a box-to-box operator, mobility is a key trait of Barkley’s natural game, but there are those who claim he needs to be given stricter restraints on what he can do and where he can go on a football pitch. Too often he is guilty of trying to do everything all on his own, all at once.

And then there are others - Everton manager Martinez, for one - who believe he needs more freedom to thrive. "You need pace and power to break into that space, and Ross gives you that,” he says, urging Hodgson to liberate the midfielder in Friday’s friendly match against Spain. Hodgson - a long-time critic of Barkley’s decision-making and ball-retention - is unlikely to give him that.

Someone, somewhere must have an idea of how to pinpoint Barkley’s footballing purpose, but at least two years of pondering have already passed with no grand conclusion reached. Where on the pitch is he most effective? Should his innate fire he harnessed or extinguished? And will he ever become the player so many want him to be - even though nobody can seemingly agree on what that player should be?

These were the type of questions was asked of Rooney too - before he hit his 30th birthday and mortality put paid to any discussion over further progression or development. Rooney will always be what he is now, and the same might be the case with Barkley. For all his undoubted talent, the Everton midfielder is pretty much the same player he was when he first burst into the first-team reckoning in 2013. If that hasn’t changed by now - over his most formative years - will it ever?

[Martinez tells Hodgson: Barkley can be the best - if you use him right]

[EVERTON FAN VIEW: He’s magic you know, Gerard Deulofeu...]

Barkley credits his Merseyside upbringing for making him the player he is now, claiming Scousers to be inherently aggressive and natural-born winners. “I just think it’s in our genes,” he says, and indeed his drive is a characteristic to be valued. Ideologically, however, Barkley is a player without much of a direction.

If Barkley is truly the spiritual lovechild of Gascoigne and Rooney, why is English football so keen to hail him as their prodigal hope? It’s not that Gascoigne and Rooney were poor players - because they obviously weren’t - but the national game is meant to be moving away from the bluster and thrust style that made those two so good. Barkley is simply an extension of that reverence.

Of course, if English football is happy with its current state, Barkley fits the bill as its future - but that seems to the contrary of the national game’s overriding zeitgeist. Comprehensive overhaul and cultural reform has been called for and Barkley, stylistically, doesn’t quite fit with that. In fact, he might even be the personification of everything the English game seeks to move away from.

For every 30-yard strike pinged into the top corner by the Everton midfielder - of which there have been a few - there is a moment of infuriating paradox. He is a playmaker who struggles to make a play, a midfielder who often neglects the midfield and a young prospect who provides a throwback to the days of old. Barkley is undoubtedly a good player, but if he truly is at the forefront of the next generation, the future of English football might look a lot like the past.

Follow Graham Ruthven @grahamruthven